In a recent test, Stone Temple Consulting put 7 Web analytics vendors to the test. Their softwares was employed at the same time over different sites.

Tested vendors included Clicktracks, Google Analytics, IndexTools, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Unica Affinium NetInsight, WebSideStory HBX Analytics and WebTrends.

The objectives of the research was very basic as is mentioned below.

"The 2007 Analytics Shoot Out is targeted at evaluating the performance, accuracy, and capabilities of 7 different analytics packages as implemented across 4 different sites. The goals of the project are as follows:

Aaron Wall has talked about a new rank checker tool SerpArchive.org The tool “is a service which daily stores the results of search engine queries indicated by user.” This service enables users to:

• to track the dynamic changes of the results of search engine queries
• to follow the rating changes of your resources and the resources of your business rivals in real time
• to analyse the changes in rating algorithm of search engines

Microsoft has launched a new AdLabs tool called Detecting Sensitive Webpages. This tool is used for determining whether a webpage contains content that might be sensitive for public viewing.

Microsoft adCenter informs:
Sensitive Content Detection helps you determine whether a webpage contains content that might be considered sensitive by general public. For example, content about porn, terrorism, or crime. This tool detects whether the input webpage contains sensitive content and assigns a confidence score.

Google Toolbar 4 is out. As ever, Aaron Wall has published a new set of buttons for it. As per now, the buttons are for Internet explorer and US only. The buttons are listed in different sections, such as Link Reputation / Link Popularity, Domain Age, On Page Content Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Blogs Link Search. There is also a helpful lesson on creating your own buttons.

Joost de Valk informs about Greasemonkey script which allows a person to know the PR of the pages linking to you as well as the anchor test used on the link.

He says:
Google Webmaster Tools shows the incoming links for your website, but you might want to know the PR of the pages linking to you and the anchor text used on the link. This Greasemonkey script does just that, by determining PR for the link through an XML HTTP request and adding it in front of the link.

Aaron Wall at SEObook recently created a keyword list cleaner that can be used to help you format keyword data into a usable format.

About the tool: Some keyword sources provide data that is in a format that is hard to use. The goal of this tool is to make it easy to grab a list of keywords from just about any public source, clean it up, and sort it in order of which terms have the greatest potential value.

Google Webmaster Tools has a lot more to it than conventionally thought about. One of the most significant function performed by this tool is to pinpoint 404 errors on your site. This data when carefully studied will help increase valid in-bound links for sure. When you see a link from within your site that is listing a 404 error it needs to be rectified asap. Site's overall pagerank are affected by 404 errors.

MSN adCenter has a really cool keyword forecasting tool.

All one has to do is type one or more keywords to get a quick analysis of:

• Number of searched over the past year
• A forecast of number of searches in the coming months
• Keyword age distribution
• Keyword gender distribution

An excellent way to make accurate projections on your traffic and sales volume.

Wordtracker has added UK keywords to their existing tools meaning that now users can specify whether they want to view UK keywords only. Andy Midel of Wordtracker said:

We collect uncompressed log files from the ISPs. From these we extract the keywords from the major engines including Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN amongst others, leaving just over 4% of the original files.

Search Engine Land reports that then go through these log files, extract data and clean it up.
 

With all the confusion regarding the functionality of Yahoo!'s Overture keyword suggestion tool just thought about providing you with a list of other useful free keyword research tools.

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Keyword Discovery Free Tool
• Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool
• Google Keyword Tool
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
• DigitalPoint Keyword Suggestion Tool